Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse by David W. Orr

Author:David W. Orr [Orr, David W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science, Life Sciences, Environmental Science, Ecology, Political Science, Environmental Policy, Public Policy, Climatic changes, Climatic changes - Environmental aspects, Environmental aspects, Earth Sciences, Environmental, Law, Meteorology & Climatology, Politics
ISBN: 9780195393538
Publisher: Oxford University Press US
Published: 2009-09-15T03:18:28+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Spirit of Connection

Only connect.

—E. M. Forster

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.

—G. K. Chesterton

Religio: to bind together.

—Webster’s Dictionary

THE CONVERSATION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF HUMAN-kind and the preservation of life cannot be bottled up at the level of technology, economics, and politics, which have to do with means, not ends. In a vacuum of meaning and purpose, however, we don’t do well either individually or collectively. Instead we are more likely to succumb to anomie, nihilism, and insensate violence. But questions about the purposes and the moral compass by which we might reorient ourselves have become much more complicated.

At the dawn of the 20th century, optimism about the human condition abounded. Science and technology seemed to promise an unlimited future, and in various ways larger questions were set aside in the intoxication with progress, the goal to master ever more of nature, and the hive-like effort to grow economies and eventually fight two world wars. But looking back across the wars, gulags, death camps, ethnic cleansings, killing fields, and mutual assured destruction, the 20th century appears rather like a passage through Hell. Looking ahead to rapid climate destabilization, the loss of perhaps a quarter to half of the species of life on Earth, and the widening gulf of poverty and living standards, we see that it may not have been a passage at all but a road toward the abyss of extinction. But it is a mistake, I think, to regard the possible suicide of humankind as an anomaly rather than the logical outcome of a wrong turn that now must be quickly undone.

For all of its complexity, the essence of the issue of sustainability was put by the writer of Deuteronomy long ago: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.” No previous generation could make that choice as fully and finally as we can. We have the choice of life and death before us, but now on a planetary scale. One might expect that this choice would have been a matter of considerable interest to mainstream Christian denominations, but with a few notable exceptions they have been, in scientist Stuart Simon’s word, “sluggish” to recognize such issues.1 Were they members of a fire department, they would still be pulling on their boots as the ashes cooled. The same could certainly be said of other religions as well as other institutions, including those of higher education. But the problem of religion in America relative to the choices we face about the possibility of our own extinction is particularly important because of the close historical connection between Christianity and capitalism, which has been the engine of planetary destruction, and because of the rapid growth of an extreme branch of Christian fundamentalism that intends “to transform the church into the religious arm of conservative Republicans” and thereby “hijack faith and politics,” in the words of liberal evangelist Jim Wallis (2005). The late Jerry

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